Interview with Neal Stephenson author of Anathem

Neal Stephenson broke onto the science fiction scene with his seminal cyberpunk hit Snow Crash in the early '90s and followed up with The Diamond Age, a more fully realized novel in the same genre. Since then his novels have grown in length and complexity and have tackled World War II era cryptography, 18th century science and adventure, and in his latest, Anathem, the far flung planet of Arbre, where the intellectually-inclined are cloistered within monastic concents, apart from the ugly consumerism and warring churches of the saecular world.

I sat down with Neal Stephenson in The Boulder Bookstore to speak about Anathem and the heady subject matter contained within as well as the author's writing habits and regimen.

MF: I understand that the inspiration for Anathem came from The Long Now Foundation's Millennium Clock. Can you tell me a little about that?

NS: Well I'd been hearing about the idea of the Millennial Clock since shortly after Danny Hillis came up with it, and talked to him and Stewart Brand about it at Hackers' conferences, circa 1995. And in 1999 or thereabouts, the Long Now Foundation was sprucing up its web site and they asked me and several other people to contribute sketches of what we thought such a clock might look like.

So I contributed one that had some of the basic elements that show up in Anathem. It had gates that opened like doors on a cuckoo clock at certain times, and it had these sort-of clock monks. And that's still up there on the Long Now's web site.

That was in the middle of the Baroque Cycle project, so I shelved it for a few years. Then in about '05 when I was getting ready to write another book, that idea kept bobbing to the surface. I liked it better than any of the other ideas, so I wrote it.

MF: It's a compelling idea. How did that single image evolve into a novel?

NS: Well, that was the question. You can't be sure if it's going to work. You have to ask yourself, "Ok - cool image, but is it really going to become a story?" So the approach I took was to start writing the conversation that opens the book. That seemed ok so I kept writing, and I developed the world as necessary as I was telling the story.

MF: So this was more of a "write and see what happens approach" rather than a "plan it all out approach" to novel-writing?

NS: Well, I've never been a "plan it all out" person, because the planning phase might last for a day or a week or a month, and then the project lasts for years. It's very unlikely that in the day or the week or the month you'll come up with a plan that's so perfect that you won't be able to improve on it during the next few years writing the book. So, you have to make it up as you go along anyway. I think it's good to have a few points that you're going to connect - a few plot points.

MF: However Anathem is so rich in its philosophy and pre-history, it seems that at some point you had to do some amount of mapping, right?

NS: Well, the philosophy is just a highly simplified, stream-lined rendition of Earth philosophy and science. The reason I put it on another planet was because to tell that history of ideas story on Earth and to get it right would have taken many many volumes. It would have been like 'Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy.'

The history of the world itself is really just sketched out. There's not a lot of detail there. There are some general ages - there's sort of a classical age, a dark age, a renaissance - that's all taken from Earth history. But beyond that, we don't really see the details because after the Reconstitution, the avout basically stop being very interested in the details.

MF: Can you tell me more about the philosophy in Anathem and how it relates to Earth philosophy?

NS: In the ancient world, the Haalikaarnians are kind of like the Platonists, the Socratic school, and the Procians are like the Sophists. And you can trace the same tendencies up through the 20th century of Earth. The Vienna Circle philosophers were kind of like the Sophists, so they're kind of on the Procian side, and Kurt Goedel was a Platonist, so he was on the Halikaarnian side. And that's an argument that still goes on today in philosophy.

MF: So you, I'm guessing from the book, are a Platonist?

NS: Well, it's not that I don't think there are good arguments on the other side, but I'm sort of fascinated by the persistence of Platonists among mathematicians and scientists. So, all mathematicians agree that 3 is a prime number. If you ask them if it was a prime number a billion years ago before there were human beings to think about such things, most mathematicians will say "yes." And if you say yes, you're basically a Platonist. You're saying that there's some inherent quality of primeness that transcends human thought as a fundamental property that is true whether or not there are human brains around to think about it.